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MWC 17: towards integrated mobility

This week Barcelona is hosting a new edition of the Mobile World Congress. The event’s importance is clearly demonstrated by its figures: 2,200 exhibitors, over 100,000 professionals and 4,000 accredited journalists. The economic activity that takes place over four days is only overshadowed by something that can sometimes appear to be in the background: the relevance of what is presented.

Some years ago, the GSMA Mobile World Congress stopped being just a trade fair on mobiles. The event has evolved in parallel to developments in technology, so that the concept of mobility is no longer an added value, but rather a necessity that opens doors to developments of extraordinary utility…

Among the innovations on offer are technologies based on the developments of groups and centres at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), some of which are CIT UPC member centres.

Multimedia contents, apps, serious games, e-health developments, cybersecurity, artificial and augmented reality applications that bear the seal of the university will have their place among the great number of products on offer at the fair.

One trend noted this year is in all aspects related to the Internet of Things (IoT). In this area, we can find the work of Inlab FIB, which has participated in a European Project to manage smart objects called BIG IoT. This Project will be presented to various companies and entities.

In the area of mobility, the Company Sparsity, a spin-off of one of the CIT UPC member centres, DAMA, will have a stand in the Congress Square (Hall 5, CS50-31) where it will present CIGO!. This is a cloud platform that integrates large volumes of data for use by managers of mobility, including city councils, fleets of vehicles and even the emergency services, as it enables mobility policies to be generated in real time.

Imatge de la plataforma cigo!

CIGO! enables personalisation of interaction between mobiles and the WebApp and the processing of data using graph technology. This leads to considerable improvements in the speed of data analysis.
In relation to data transmission and security, another of the technologies that is already being worked on by some of our researchers can be used to evaluate the security of information transmission in mobile devices, using the electromagnetic field generated by the devices themselves.

In the area of technologies applied to health, an electrocardiograph that is easy to use and affordable will be presented. The device is designed to undertake cardiovascular pre-diagnoses in less than a minute. This is the first system to detect both the electrical activity of the heart (electrocardiogram) and its mechanical activity (arterial pulse wave) using contact with the hands and feet through two pairs of metal sensors. The device has been patented by a group of UPC researchers led by Ramon Pallàs.

Like the MWC, our technological developments have been expanded to use mobility as the basis for offering new products and services that open up many opportunities in the area of public and business management.

Integrated mobility solutions for local development. Have a great fair everyone!